Twins (10 page)

Then Jon Pear was there.

How had he done it? How had he appeared like this? Why was his schedule not filled with classes like other people?

He and Van were looking at each other like pit bulls eager to rip off each other’s flesh. Except that Jon Pear was smiling. “Scenes,” said Jon Pear, “seem to be Scarlett’s specialty.”

Mary Lee didn’t want anybody to start anything. How was she supposed to have an ordinary life? “Please! Let’s just sit together and have pizza and be friends.”

Van stared at her incredulously. “You? Friends? Get real, Madrigal.”

“I have lots of friends,” she said quickly. “Everybody in French told me how sorry they are for me.”

“Everybody in French is afraid of you,” said Van.

She knew that. She couldn’t keep up the pretense any more. The smiles had been quivers of fear. The sympathy cards that piled up at the house were letters of protection.

I have no friends, she thought.

She wanted to die, the way at boarding school she had wanted to die. Friends were everything,
everything
!

Jon Pear spoke so softly it was not speech, but thought etched with a sharp metal tool upon the opposite brain. “You have me, Madrigal,” said Jon Pear. “I am your twin now. Come. We will work on your next gift.”

“No!” shouted Van. “We won’t let you! Everybody knows what kinds of things you do! There aren’t any victims left around here. You can’t get away with it again.”

“I’m not Madrigal,” Mary Lee said, desperate now. There had to be a way out. “I’m Mary Lee.”

“You think we’d fall for that?” Van was shaking with rage. “You think we’d believe for one minute that you’re sweet Mary Lee? Get out of town, Madrigal. Take your sick boyfriend and go. Nobody would care. Nobody would miss you.”

She went.

She could not stand alone, not against an entire school, and besides, Jon Pear cared. He was a friend and, in the end, aren’t friends everything?

I
HAVE A BOYFRIEND
, thought Mary Lee.

A pillar in a falling world. Somebody to walk with. Somebody who wants to walk with me. Somebody who wants to walk with me only.

Jon Pear seemed to have no classes, no teachers, no school, nothing but the task of moving Madrigal from place to place. He seemed able to stay with her for good.

But is it for good? said the corners of her heart and the depths of her gut.
Or is it for evil?

His arm lay around her. It was strangely light, as if he were made of aluminum instead of flesh and bone. If she hugged Jon Pear, would she feel ribs and spine? Was he even human?

Mary Lee needed answers.

She began carefully. “Being a twin,” she said to Jon Pear, “is like being an occupied country, with an occupying army watching every move. Since I’m not used to being single, I’m trying to understand who Madrigal was just before the accident.”

“Who Madrigal
is
,” said Jon Pear easily. “It would have been a cute game if Van and Scarlett had believed you were Mary Lee, but they didn’t.” He smiled at her, a wide shining smile. “And who
you
are, Madrigal, is evil.” The smile was happy as sunbeams, yellow dust on warm summer days.

“Not pure evil, of course,” he said. His eyes were gold. “I’m pure. You’re mixed. But you always surrender to me, because being bad is so much more fun. You’re good at bad, Madrigal.”

Mary Lee refused to think that. We were identical. I would have known if I had a sister who was good at bad.

Jon Pear drew his finger around Mary Lee’s face, as if he were drawing her portrait. As if he could style her personality, and her actions, and even her smile. She knew it was the truth, then, that Madrigal had been good at bad. Would she, Mary Lee, surrender to Jon Pear? Did Mother and Father know? Had they read in Madrigal’s heart what Mary Lee hadn’t? A turning to evil for the fun of it?

But what was it they did together, Madrigal and Jon Pear? Whatever it was, it involved victims: Scarlett and others.

“Scarlett,” she whispered through thickened tongue and brain, “and the others … what …?”

“Who cares about them? They’re history, we worked them over.” His gold-stained eyes were as impossible to understand as medieval stained glass windows. “Choose another one, Madrigal. It’s your turn. I saved your turn when you were offing Mary Lee.”

The flecks of gold left his eyes and hung in the air between their faces, like a veil. His eyes, without gold, were black stones at the bottom of some endless shaft.

Mary Lee held her hair behind her head, using her hand for a barrette and thought of Madrigal, flinging away the elegant green ornament as if she were …
flinging away her twin
.

Mary Lee wanted to hide. To hide she had to get home, and to get home she had to get away from Jon Pear and from school.

Time to tell Mother and Father who I am, she thought.

How bizarre if they did not believe her, either. What if she had to resort to a laboratory! Genetic blood typing, or something, to prove which twin lived. Prove she was Mary Lee.

“I can’t choose now,” she said, forcing herself to sound irritable instead of afraid. “It’s only my second day back and my heart hurts. I need to be away from all this pressure.”

“You love pressure,” he snapped.

A shiver raced all the way up her spine into her hair, down between her eyes, and back to her ribs, an all-encompassing shudder.

How do I get out of this? I’ll be a victim myself if I’m not careful of Jon Pear. He will hate me for tricking him. He’s dangerous. But I can’t go on being Madrigal, either. She’s dangerous, too.

Jon Pear’s eyes tracked the shudder. His shining smile hid behind twitching lips.

“My darling Madrigal,” he whispered. “Song of the murmuring waters. We go on, you and I, regardless of your feelings after the fact.”

After the fact of what? The — she hated the word; it was a sick ugly horrid word — the
offing
of Mary Lee?

His eyes were boiling. His patience burned off, leaving the real Jon Pear snarling at her. “Pick, Madrigal!” He spit the consonants. “Choose!” He lingered on the vowels. “Who shall it be?”

She had to close her eyes. “Jon Pear, why did you take my tear?”

“What do you mean, why? I love to scare people. People are always scared when you do something they don’t understand. Look at you. You were terrified even though you knew perfectly well what I was doing.”

“What were you doing?” she said.

Jon Pear was getting really annoyed. He took the gold chain off and dropped it over her head. Her own tear hung beneath her own throat. She jerked off the rubber cap and poured the tear out on the floor. She was being superstitious and stupid, but she hated him wearing her tear. “My sister — ” she began.

“Stop using her for an excuse! Once you began loving me, you didn’t have room to love anybody else, and you know it. You have a very limited capacity for love, Madrigal.”

He kissed her. The kiss was both demanding and giving. She actually enjoyed it, actually wanted more, at the same time she wanted to run.

“You’re whiplash,” she whispered.

He loved that. He lifted her like a china doll and swung her around. “My darling whiplash,” he said, “please choose.” He seemed younger than he had, and sweeter.

If I knew the rules to the game, thought Mary Lee, I could play. And if I knew the rules to the game, I could also end it.

He kissed her throat.

She would stop this game as it happened, as she saw the mystery unravel. Perhaps she could be the heroine of this high school! The savior! She’d win those hostile people back as her friends. She’d be the most popular girl in school after all, if she could stop Jon Pear in his tracks. Therefore, she would start in with him. She’d gather facts. Then, cleverly, she’d end whatever charade Jon Pear was playing. “You choose, Jon Pear. I’m too tired.”

He doubled over laughing. “All right. We’ll cruise the town and pick somebody up. Van has warned everybody here. But there are two private schools and another high school and the Arts and Music High School. We’ll go to Arts. Any kid that decides to do nothing but play the oboe all day long is flaky, and they’ll go along with flaky suggestions. Once they’ve gotten started, of course, there’s no way out.”

Mary Lee felt tough and competent. I will provide the way out, she said to herself. Didn’t I survive all by myself at boarding school? I can handle anything.

Jon Pear led her out of the school. Even though she was going to trick him, she felt like a follower, not a leader planning to go in some other direction. Her opposition was melting. She was being steered by him as if she were a wheel. His wheel.

Jon Pear crossed town and found the Arts and Music High School. There, the driveways were so lined by the vertical points of cedar trees, the school was invisible. Only the hedges were real.

The interior of Jon Pear’s car was sleek and electronic, stupendously expensive, technologically years ahead of anything Mary Lee had ever driven. He must have a very rich family, thought Mary Lee. She wondered if Madrigal had visited Jon Pear at home. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who had a home, or parents, or closets, or breakfast.

Jon Pear frowned. His big lips drew into an odd pout, his golden eyes hooded by his own brows.

The marching band was practicing formations on a field beyond the student parking lots. A single student watched from the pavement. Jeans, jacket, and short hair made it difficult to tell whether it was a boy or a girl.

Jon Pear smiled. “There,” he said softly, a hunter spotting a deer. “We’ve got one.”

Mary Lee saw that surrendering to Bad did not require her to do Bad. It only required that she go along with it. “What will you do?” she asked, sick and fascinated at the same time.

Jon Pear laughed. “What will
we
do?” he corrected her.

J
ON PEAR PARKED, LEAVING
the car without a word. She sat in the passenger seat, knowing that neither she nor that student in jeans should be a passenger of Jon Pear’s.

It was a girl, lots of makeup on a gamin face, hazel eyes, and tipped nose. Her legs and tiny feet treated the band’s marches like ballet music, and she danced in slow motion as Jon Pear spoke to her.

Again and again, she giggled, tilting her head flirtily, dancing.

Jon Pear was at his handsomest. His golden-certain self gleamed like a trophy before her. When she paused to hug herself against the cold, he whipped off his jacket like her male dance partner and roped her close to him with its empty sleeves. They both laughed, and he leaned down, and she leaned up, and they touched — not lips, but foreheads.

Jon Pear escorted her to the car.

She, too, had surrendered. Whatever he had offered her, she was eager to have.

Mary Lee trembled, but the girl was laughing.

“Hi,” she said to Mary Lee, ducking into the backseat. “Jon Pear says you’re getting up a party to go into the city. I never go in unless I’m with friends because you know it’s so dangerous. But when you’re in a group, of course, you’re not afraid, so this is really great. I’ve been noticing Jon Pear around the high school. I don’t go to Arts yet, but I keep applying, maybe some semester I’ll qualify, but of course right now I’m only a sophomore at the regular high school with you. This is pretty neat, what a great car! I usually don’t hang out with seniors. In fact I hardly even know any seniors. My name is Katy, and you’re Madrigal, aren’t you? I love your name. Jon Pear says it means song of the murmuring waters. Are we just going to party? See a movie? What will we be doing? Who else is going?”

Katy did not seem nervous, but as if babbling was normal for her.

Jon Pear eased his car off the Arts campus. His eyes were icier than the wind, and his smile more cruel.

The car, utterly silent, without the slightest bump or jostle, moved on like soft butter being spread. At a stoplight, where the car ceased traveling forward so gently, so imperceptibly, that Mary Lee could not even compare it to normal vehicles, she thought: I’m just getting out. There’s a McDonald’s over there, I’ll just use the phone, call Mother and Father, leave Katy and Jon Pear to whatever —

The door handle did not move.

The temperature in Mary Lee’s body dropped several degrees. Without attracting any attention she slipped her fingers to the door lock on the window ledge. She could not pull it up.

Jon Pear was smiling broadly. He did not look at Mary Lee. He did not look at Katy in his rearview mirror. He smiled down the road and into the night he had planned.

Van had supposedly “warned” everybody in the high school — but two thousand students attended that high school. Nobody knew “everybody.” When people said “everybody,” they meant the hundred or so kids they actually knew.

So this is what a victim looks like, thought Mary Lee.
Katy
. “Don’t you have to call your parents, Katy?” said Mary Lee.

Now she had Jon Pear’s attention? “What are you up to?” he hissed incredulously.

Katy was bouncing eagerly, a ballet dance from the waist up. “Heck no. My parents never care what I’m doing. I mean, they don’t even care what they’re doing, you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” said Jon Pear sympathetically.

Mary Lee didn’t. What kind of parents were those?

Jon Pear passed the fast food places: Burger King, Roy Rogers, Arby’s, Subway, and Dunkin’ Donuts vanished. He passed motels and garages, discount stores, and factories.

He accelerated, and drove upward onto the raised superhighway that led into the depths of the city.

“Jon Pear, this is a limited access road,” said Katy. “I mean, like, from this road we sure aren’t going to stop at any houses. I thought, you know, lots of people were going to the party. How are you going to pick anybody up? Did you actually mean to get on at the next entrance? Because I know a shortcut if what you want is — ”

“We’ll meet everybody else there,” said Jon Pear.

Who will they be? thought Mary Lee. Who are the other players in this game? If I don’t go along with Jon Pear, I won’t get answers and be able to stop him … but what if I can’t stop him? What if Katy and I end up in serious trouble? And neither of our parents will know where we are?